16 ms·

Survival of the Prettiest

225 points by Hooke 9y ago

notgood 9y ago
.
- wozz 9y ago
  It's short lived
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago
  It’s probably just as hard to be good at being an “influencer” as it is to be a good developer. But the hard parts are much different.
- vecter 9y ago
  You could say the same thing for intelligence, which is arguably more valuable. Intelligence allows you to have a comfy 9-5 job and long-term stable career making 6 figures a year writing software and doing something you love.
- metalliqaz 9y ago
  Being good looking also helps coders, though to a lesser degree than Instagram models. Better looking job candidates tend to get hired more and get more promotions. Personally, it doesn't amaze me at all how important good looks are for a model. I know I'd prefer to look at a lithe college coed bounce around in Ibiza rather than a frumpy mother of three work in a textile factory. It's programmed into my animal brain. It helps to keep in mind that "influencers" are a product of a lot more than good genes. It takes a large investment into beauty products, hair stylists, clothes, camera equipment, travel, etc. These people are constructed using their fit bodies as a foundation to build upon. Taylor Swift is a product, not merely a person. Her development costs surely tally into the millions.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
Nobody chooses who to reproduce with for purely sexual reasons. We choose who to have kids with based on a very complicated array of factors like who the person is, what they do, how much they earn, is there good chemistry and of course also physical appearances. Human evolution seems to no longer be driven by nature, but I don’t think it’s true to say selection is purely sexual in the modern world. The term “agency” from the article best describes it I think. In essence humans are now self-selecting the path of their evolution through conscious agency. Pretty trippy to think about actually
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  > Nobody chooses who to reproduce with for purely sexual reasons. People are most definitely making mate selections (at least on Tinder) on physical attractiveness, primarily. We won't even scratch the surface of the argument that prettier people have it easier in life for this thread's purposes. "This study was conducted to quantify the Tinder socio-economic prospects for males based on the percentage of females that will “like” them. Female Tinder usage data was collected and statistically analyzed to determine the inequality in the Tinder economy. It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. The Gini coefficient for the Tinder economy based on “like” percentages was calculated to be 0.58. This means that the Tinder economy has more inequality than 95.1% of all the world’s national economies. In addition, it was determined that a man of average attractiveness would be “liked” by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder." https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a#.u9kjjrno3 https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (emphasis above sourced from Medium highlights) EDIT: HN throttling kicked in, can't reply to replies to this: My personal opinion (insert enormous disclaimer here) is that Tinder is providing the illusion of choice (hundreds, thousands of profiles you can swipe through in an hour) and higher "quality" (top percentiles of both sexes shown to everyone) that is not within the grasp of most users. I don't want the Whole Foods/Amazon of dating apps, I want the Aldi: average looking people who are decent human beings who share an interest or two with me.
creaghpatr 9y ago
Evolution of Beauty was a great book, but it was a little depressing how the author had to face a ton of entrenched academic prejudice to get his theory out. That aspect alone is more interesting than the actual book, which focuses on Darwin's The Descent of Man arguments that have been marginalized due to their implications rather than their accuracy. Lots of interesting bird trivia, too, if you're into that.
- metalliqaz 9y ago
  Even in 2017, mankind is still trying to move from eminence-based science to evidence-based science.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    Eminence helped slow down science down enough to be digested throughout the community in the pre-internet era. Eminence was a proxy for a level-0 filter on good science. As the world moves to become more connected than ever, eminence is too slow and inefficient. Hopefully we can come out of this with evidence as the new king and not some other proxy. We're gonna have to make some changes to get there. (Publication bias, replication prejudice, preregistration, better statistics, reporting accuracy...)
    - FractalNerve 9y ago
      I really like your thinking and believe that there is an eminent truth behind it. Such that loose social connectedness naturally procreates the development of such proxies as a form of stabilization mechanism. What I'd really like to understand and see visualized are the non-linear social dynamics presented in manifold theory.
jtraffic 9y ago
What explains why the females like what they like? Perhaps I'm just lost, but could it be that natural selection explains sexual preferences, which has a subsequent impact on evolution? > this “aesthetic” courtship, says Prum, creates an environment, temperaments and rituals — a sort of culture — that give the female sexual choice, autonomy and safety Maybe natural selection at a species level (notice the word 'safety') selects for individual-level sexual preferences? If that is true, the theories aren't substitutes, but complements. Again, maybe I'm just lost.
pdog 9y ago
What's most incredible about Darwin is how readable and essential (and fundamentally correct) his two major treatises, Origin and Descent, have remained. It's like Newton not only discovering calculus but also inventing its modern syntax and writing the best textbook on the subject.
- neves 9y ago
  Yes, it is really readable. I've got an illustrated edition as a teenager, and it is still one of my cherished bookds. BTW, in "non math" knowledge areas it is impressive how readable are the seminal papers.
  - FractalNerve 9y ago
    Math's Syntax and 'universal' language is a great barrier that unlocks the world's knowledge. Applied scientific fields take almost 10-20 years until they sieve/diffuse the knowledge, due to this barrier. (In my perception at least) I wish math used a pythonesque and popular alternative language, so that very low- or high-level 'assumptions' weren't blocking a greater audience from participating in the field. Although I'm familiar with it, I find it sometimes a little too elitist, because almost every symbol requires an explanation, before it can be used. Javascript and Python have this great balance, I feel is urgently needed in Maths.
    - donmatito 9y ago
      As the joke goes Programmer : chooses her variables always different, with a name as explicit as possible Mathematician : chooses her variables from a handful of greek letters
      - banku_brougham 9y ago
        You would grant that this is not a funny-haha joke.
      - ska 9y ago
        ... from a handful of greek letters that usually already have agreed upon meaning or connotation within her subspecialty. So everyone reading it understands what is going on. Unfortunately, it doesn't generalize across specialties. By comparison, the programmer chooses names explicitly based her own understanding and modeling of the problem, which may confuse others. both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses.
nether 9y ago
And this is why sperm banks require donors be at least 5'9" tall.
- ApolloRising 9y ago
  That's one huge sperm
  - npgatech 9y ago
    Go to reddit please. I am seeing HN degrade day by day with jokes and puns.
- drpgq 9y ago
  As a short male, I'm kind of hoping that rampant SJWism will eventually get basketball banned at schools. Note I'm not being serious but who knows what will happen in the future.
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    Wrestlers and boxers have separate weight categories so people with different weights can compete in fairness. Why not basketball?
    - josefresco 9y ago
      Basketball is played 5 on 5. good teams are comprised of a balance of players. Even 1 on 1 an equally talented 6 foot 5 player could easily beat a 7 footer due to his superior speed and maneuverability.
      - klipt 9y ago
        > Even 1 on 1 an equally talented 6 foot 5 player could easily beat a 7 footer due to his superior speed and maneuverability. Okay but even your shorter example, 6'5" is the top 0.5% of men by height - what about average height people?
osteele 9y ago
I clicked on this expecting a review of Nancy Etcoff's _Survival of the Prettiest_ (2000), another work in this area. The New York Times review of Etcoff's book is called "The Beautiful People" <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrmat.html> http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrm..., but the review is about _Survival of the Prettiest_. Lewis Carroll would be happy with this. I wasn't able to find an NYT review of the Marilyn Manson album.
gaius 9y ago
The best book sort-of about Darwin is This Thing Of Darkness by Harry Thompson.
subroutine 9y ago
It seems like Prum is taking many interpretational liberties and often engages in anthropomorphization. "The other evolutionary answer is the aesthetic route — the resolution of differences between male and female needs and desires by behaviors and rituals that respect the other sex’s priorities and their decisions about how to pursue them." The thing about beauty is that it is in the eye of the beholder. It is still subject to the fundamentals of natural selection. Those animals that have an eye for asthetic (phenotyipic) traits that signal something about the environmental and sexual fitness of their mate will have hearty offspring. For example it is possible that Bower birds who make the 'prettiest' nests are great scavengers in general, a trait that can also be used to collect food for their children. Further, I doubt it has much to do with the male Bower "respecting the female's priorities and decisions about how to pursue them". The male that fails an attempt to court a potential mate is not thinking "well dang, if i dont respect her for not appriciating my nest. After all it was a half-ass attempt and dont i know it". It is probably thinking at most, when she flys away - 'do not follow; waste of energy; reengage collecting red bobbles and find worm' Lastly I think 'oddity' is being interpreted as 'beauty'; an animal might have something unique going on - maybe some allele that codes for a protein variant resulting in some funky red spots on its feathers; more importantly that same protein variant confers some pathogenic immunity. Now, a female bird that chooses this mate might also have a genetic predisposition that makes her more attracted to that red spotty hairdo. Two important things happen here. First these two will have offspring that probably will, if female, like those red spots, or if male, have those red spots (and the immunity); and secondly there is a phenotype - 'an odd visual asthetic' - that can be used to indicate what this birds genes are (specifically that it has this good immunity allele). Simply having the immunity allele would make it more fit, but the females would have no way of knowing. Having a phenotype that indicates something to the female will in my estimation likely increase the rate at which this allele proliferate since these beautiful red spots confer a nice environmental adaptation
- dolzenko 9y ago
  > (As noted, she doesn’t get everything; once she and the male mate and part, she raises the offspring by herself.) You can argue of course its genes of good scavenger that get selected for.
jmull 9y ago
Hm... I guess there's no particular reason a species has to optimize its fitness beyond a certain level. It just needs to find a niche and occupy it. At that point, the mechanisms, cycles, and patterns of life for the species continue, but no longer need to select for improved fitness. So I guess it makes some sense that selection would then go down an arbitrary path, of a complexity commensurate with the life form. Let's say humans (or our ancestors) achieved our base level of fitness (a stable and thriving species with a well-established niche) as social, tool-using primates. Our achievements of language, abstract thinking, civilization, culture, art, complex tools, religion, science, etc. might be the result of pursuing that arbitrary, aesthetic path. The species would have done just fine without any of that, but we did it all anyway. Interesting. I don't know how much I buy it, but it is an interesting direction I haven't thought about before.
- kilotaras 9y ago
  Evolution doesn't work on species level, but on individual level. There's still an in-species competition. Probability of gene A to fixate is roughly equal to 2s, where s is increased relative fitness. (e.g. 10% for gene that gives 5% increase). Such genes will spread even if species as a whole has a niche to populate. I would recommend reading [1] - a series of essays on evolution and math behind it. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution#Blog_posts_.28sequence.29 https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution#Blog_posts_.28sequ...
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    What about group selection & kin selection? (Not sure if those are the correct terms) Isn't that a huge reason for the existence of pro-social behavior?
  - jmull 9y ago
    I get that there's in-species competition, and that the successful competitors will come to dominate, perhaps completely. But what I'm thinking is that when a species is established in a niche, the direction of that competition is arbitrary rather than being limited to competing for resources. Once the level of resources needed to procreate are generally available, the individuals can compete over anything at hand. As you say, "fitness" is a key concept, but fitness for what? If you don't need more resources, then on what basis are you competing to be more fit? If you happen to be a social tool using species, then it could be based on those things: more complex and subtle social structures (and the language to support that), more complex and subtle tool use (and the abstract thinking to support that).
randyrand 9y ago
Ultimately natural selection dominates, of course. But sexual selection is a real evolutionary force and has the ability to either greatly increase the evolution rate (which is why gender evolved in the first place) or at times regress it. I wonder how often sexual selection back-fires and why, but I imagine thats the exception not the rule.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > which is why gender evolved in the first place You mean as a social construct? Because if you mean that in the biological sense, then sex has probably more to do with sharing beneficial mutations, and error correction against the bad ones: https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest-a-reason-for-sex-20170713/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest-a-r...
  - randyrand 9y ago
    That's the same thing as what I said. It augments the evolution rate. Gender allows us to evolve faster/better because it allows the brain/choice to influence evolution at a higher level.
laughinghan 9y ago
Without passing judgment on the book itself, which I have not read, I find key elements of the argument as presented in this review to be unconvincing. > Consider, for instance, this handful of well-known distinguishing human traits: [...human mating behaviors...] none of these traits evolved in our fellow ape species. Prum argues that they evolved in humans because they help women evaluate men’s prosocial-pleasure potential. Wait but, if they're so helpful, why didn't they evolve in our fellow ape species too? Our mating behaviors aren't any more evolved than apes, the apes of today have had exactly the same amount of time to evolve as we have. Shouldn't this case be made based on archeological species that we've since outcompeted? An a separate note, this review makes it sound like no one else has done significant work on sexual selection. Isn't Fisherian runaway, for example, a well-known instance of sexual selection? And Ronald Fisher was a key figure in the modern synthesis.
- pygy_ 9y ago
  > Shouldn't this case be made based on archeological species that we've since outcompeted? Wait a few decades and we'll be the only ape species left (not counting captive subjects). Edit, since the above extrapolation isn't apparently convincing: all ape species are currently endangered. While they are not extinct yet, we have outcompeted them to the point where we have to take active measures for them not to become so.
- hwillis 9y ago
  > Wait but, if they're so helpful, why didn't they evolve in our fellow ape species too? Apes have vastly different social structures than humans. Those structures do not encourage those traits. Apes have strict ranking and group around families. In chimps, females emigrate after puberty and permanently relocate to other groups. Fertility is used as a passport to join a new group. Constant fertility would be disruptive. Humans want to have sex constantly because it helps form large communities. The possibility of mating bonds together many nonfamily groups. Humans do better in large groups, so attractive features are selected for much more strongly. In ape groups it doesn't matter, because they simply accept or reject new apes based on the size of the group and availability of resources.
codeisawesome 9y ago
Haha, what a mischeviously written article. The author appears to have learned a lesson or two :-)

225 points by Hooke 9y ago

wozz 9y ago
It's short lived
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
It’s probably just as hard to be good at being an “influencer” as it is to be a good developer. But the hard parts are much different.
vecter 9y ago
You could say the same thing for intelligence, which is arguably more valuable. Intelligence allows you to have a comfy 9-5 job and long-term stable career making 6 figures a year writing software and doing something you love.
metalliqaz 9y ago
Being good looking also helps coders, though to a lesser degree than Instagram models. Better looking job candidates tend to get hired more and get more promotions. Personally, it doesn't amaze me at all how important good looks are for a model. I know I'd prefer to look at a lithe college coed bounce around in Ibiza rather than a frumpy mother of three work in a textile factory. It's programmed into my animal brain. It helps to keep in mind that "influencers" are a product of a lot more than good genes. It takes a large investment into beauty products, hair stylists, clothes, camera equipment, travel, etc. These people are constructed using their fit bodies as a foundation to build upon. Taylor Swift is a product, not merely a person. Her development costs surely tally into the millions.

Nobody chooses who to reproduce with for purely sexual reasons. We choose who to have kids with based on a very complicated array of factors like who the person is, what they do, how much they earn, is there good chemistry and of course also physical appearances. Human evolution seems to no longer be driven by nature, but I don’t think it’s true to say selection is purely sexual in the modern world. The term “agency” from the article best describes it I think. In essence humans are now self-selecting the path of their evolution through conscious agency. Pretty trippy to think about actually

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> Nobody chooses who to reproduce with for purely sexual reasons. People are most definitely making mate selections (at least on Tinder) on physical attractiveness, primarily. We won't even scratch the surface of the argument that prettier people have it easier in life for this thread's purposes. "This study was conducted to quantify the Tinder socio-economic prospects for males based on the percentage of females that will “like” them. Female Tinder usage data was collected and statistically analyzed to determine the inequality in the Tinder economy. It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. The Gini coefficient for the Tinder economy based on “like” percentages was calculated to be 0.58. This means that the Tinder economy has more inequality than 95.1% of all the world’s national economies. In addition, it was determined that a man of average attractiveness would be “liked” by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder." https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a#.u9kjjrno3 https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (emphasis above sourced from Medium highlights) EDIT: HN throttling kicked in, can't reply to replies to this: My personal opinion (insert enormous disclaimer here) is that Tinder is providing the illusion of choice (hundreds, thousands of profiles you can swipe through in an hour) and higher "quality" (top percentiles of both sexes shown to everyone) that is not within the grasp of most users. I don't want the Whole Foods/Amazon of dating apps, I want the Aldi: average looking people who are decent human beings who share an interest or two with me.

creaghpatr 9y ago

Evolution of Beauty was a great book, but it was a little depressing how the author had to face a ton of entrenched academic prejudice to get his theory out. That aspect alone is more interesting than the actual book, which focuses on Darwin's The Descent of Man arguments that have been marginalized due to their implications rather than their accuracy. Lots of interesting bird trivia, too, if you're into that.

metalliqaz 9y ago
Even in 2017, mankind is still trying to move from eminence-based science to evidence-based science.
- infogulch 9y ago
  Eminence helped slow down science down enough to be digested throughout the community in the pre-internet era. Eminence was a proxy for a level-0 filter on good science. As the world moves to become more connected than ever, eminence is too slow and inefficient. Hopefully we can come out of this with evidence as the new king and not some other proxy. We're gonna have to make some changes to get there. (Publication bias, replication prejudice, preregistration, better statistics, reporting accuracy...)
  - FractalNerve 9y ago
    I really like your thinking and believe that there is an eminent truth behind it. Such that loose social connectedness naturally procreates the development of such proxies as a form of stabilization mechanism. What I'd really like to understand and see visualized are the non-linear social dynamics presented in manifold theory.

jtraffic 9y ago

What explains why the females like what they like? Perhaps I'm just lost, but could it be that natural selection explains sexual preferences, which has a subsequent impact on evolution? > this “aesthetic” courtship, says Prum, creates an environment, temperaments and rituals — a sort of culture — that give the female sexual choice, autonomy and safety Maybe natural selection at a species level (notice the word 'safety') selects for individual-level sexual preferences? If that is true, the theories aren't substitutes, but complements. Again, maybe I'm just lost.

pdog 9y ago

What's most incredible about Darwin is how readable and essential (and fundamentally correct) his two major treatises, Origin and Descent, have remained. It's like Newton not only discovering calculus but also inventing its modern syntax and writing the best textbook on the subject.

neves 9y ago
Yes, it is really readable. I've got an illustrated edition as a teenager, and it is still one of my cherished bookds. BTW, in "non math" knowledge areas it is impressive how readable are the seminal papers.
- FractalNerve 9y ago
  Math's Syntax and 'universal' language is a great barrier that unlocks the world's knowledge. Applied scientific fields take almost 10-20 years until they sieve/diffuse the knowledge, due to this barrier. (In my perception at least) I wish math used a pythonesque and popular alternative language, so that very low- or high-level 'assumptions' weren't blocking a greater audience from participating in the field. Although I'm familiar with it, I find it sometimes a little too elitist, because almost every symbol requires an explanation, before it can be used. Javascript and Python have this great balance, I feel is urgently needed in Maths.
  - donmatito 9y ago
    As the joke goes Programmer : chooses her variables always different, with a name as explicit as possible Mathematician : chooses her variables from a handful of greek letters
    - banku_brougham 9y ago
      You would grant that this is not a funny-haha joke.
    - ska 9y ago
      ... from a handful of greek letters that usually already have agreed upon meaning or connotation within her subspecialty. So everyone reading it understands what is going on. Unfortunately, it doesn't generalize across specialties. By comparison, the programmer chooses names explicitly based her own understanding and modeling of the problem, which may confuse others. both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses.

nether 9y ago

And this is why sperm banks require donors be at least 5'9" tall.

ApolloRising 9y ago
That's one huge sperm
- npgatech 9y ago
  Go to reddit please. I am seeing HN degrade day by day with jokes and puns.
drpgq 9y ago
As a short male, I'm kind of hoping that rampant SJWism will eventually get basketball banned at schools. Note I'm not being serious but who knows what will happen in the future.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  Wrestlers and boxers have separate weight categories so people with different weights can compete in fairness. Why not basketball?
  - josefresco 9y ago
    Basketball is played 5 on 5. good teams are comprised of a balance of players. Even 1 on 1 an equally talented 6 foot 5 player could easily beat a 7 footer due to his superior speed and maneuverability.
    - klipt 9y ago
      > Even 1 on 1 an equally talented 6 foot 5 player could easily beat a 7 footer due to his superior speed and maneuverability. Okay but even your shorter example, 6'5" is the top 0.5% of men by height - what about average height people?

osteele 9y ago

I clicked on this expecting a review of Nancy Etcoff's _Survival of the Prettiest_ (2000), another work in this area. The New York Times review of Etcoff's book is called "The Beautiful People" <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrmat.html> http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrm..., but the review is about _Survival of the Prettiest_. Lewis Carroll would be happy with this. I wasn't able to find an NYT review of the Marilyn Manson album.

gaius 9y ago

The best book sort-of about Darwin is This Thing Of Darkness by Harry Thompson.

subroutine 9y ago

It seems like Prum is taking many interpretational liberties and often engages in anthropomorphization. "The other evolutionary answer is the aesthetic route — the resolution of differences between male and female needs and desires by behaviors and rituals that respect the other sex’s priorities and their decisions about how to pursue them." The thing about beauty is that it is in the eye of the beholder. It is still subject to the fundamentals of natural selection. Those animals that have an eye for asthetic (phenotyipic) traits that signal something about the environmental and sexual fitness of their mate will have hearty offspring. For example it is possible that Bower birds who make the 'prettiest' nests are great scavengers in general, a trait that can also be used to collect food for their children. Further, I doubt it has much to do with the male Bower "respecting the female's priorities and decisions about how to pursue them". The male that fails an attempt to court a potential mate is not thinking "well dang, if i dont respect her for not appriciating my nest. After all it was a half-ass attempt and dont i know it". It is probably thinking at most, when she flys away - 'do not follow; waste of energy; reengage collecting red bobbles and find worm' Lastly I think 'oddity' is being interpreted as 'beauty'; an animal might have something unique going on - maybe some allele that codes for a protein variant resulting in some funky red spots on its feathers; more importantly that same protein variant confers some pathogenic immunity. Now, a female bird that chooses this mate might also have a genetic predisposition that makes her more attracted to that red spotty hairdo. Two important things happen here. First these two will have offspring that probably will, if female, like those red spots, or if male, have those red spots (and the immunity); and secondly there is a phenotype - 'an odd visual asthetic' - that can be used to indicate what this birds genes are (specifically that it has this good immunity allele). Simply having the immunity allele would make it more fit, but the females would have no way of knowing. Having a phenotype that indicates something to the female will in my estimation likely increase the rate at which this allele proliferate since these beautiful red spots confer a nice environmental adaptation

dolzenko 9y ago
> (As noted, she doesn’t get everything; once she and the male mate and part, she raises the offspring by herself.) You can argue of course its genes of good scavenger that get selected for.

jmull 9y ago

Hm... I guess there's no particular reason a species has to optimize its fitness beyond a certain level. It just needs to find a niche and occupy it. At that point, the mechanisms, cycles, and patterns of life for the species continue, but no longer need to select for improved fitness. So I guess it makes some sense that selection would then go down an arbitrary path, of a complexity commensurate with the life form. Let's say humans (or our ancestors) achieved our base level of fitness (a stable and thriving species with a well-established niche) as social, tool-using primates. Our achievements of language, abstract thinking, civilization, culture, art, complex tools, religion, science, etc. might be the result of pursuing that arbitrary, aesthetic path. The species would have done just fine without any of that, but we did it all anyway. Interesting. I don't know how much I buy it, but it is an interesting direction I haven't thought about before.

kilotaras 9y ago
Evolution doesn't work on species level, but on individual level. There's still an in-species competition. Probability of gene A to fixate is roughly equal to 2s, where s is increased relative fitness. (e.g. 10% for gene that gives 5% increase). Such genes will spread even if species as a whole has a niche to populate. I would recommend reading [1] - a series of essays on evolution and math behind it. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution#Blog_posts_.28sequence.29 https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Evolution#Blog_posts_.28sequ...
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  What about group selection & kin selection? (Not sure if those are the correct terms) Isn't that a huge reason for the existence of pro-social behavior?
- jmull 9y ago
  I get that there's in-species competition, and that the successful competitors will come to dominate, perhaps completely. But what I'm thinking is that when a species is established in a niche, the direction of that competition is arbitrary rather than being limited to competing for resources. Once the level of resources needed to procreate are generally available, the individuals can compete over anything at hand. As you say, "fitness" is a key concept, but fitness for what? If you don't need more resources, then on what basis are you competing to be more fit? If you happen to be a social tool using species, then it could be based on those things: more complex and subtle social structures (and the language to support that), more complex and subtle tool use (and the abstract thinking to support that).

randyrand 9y ago

Ultimately natural selection dominates, of course. But sexual selection is a real evolutionary force and has the ability to either greatly increase the evolution rate (which is why gender evolved in the first place) or at times regress it. I wonder how often sexual selection back-fires and why, but I imagine thats the exception not the rule.

vanderZwan 9y ago
> which is why gender evolved in the first place You mean as a social construct? Because if you mean that in the biological sense, then sex has probably more to do with sharing beneficial mutations, and error correction against the bad ones: https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest-a-reason-for-sex-20170713/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/missing-mutations-suggest-a-r...
- randyrand 9y ago
  That's the same thing as what I said. It augments the evolution rate. Gender allows us to evolve faster/better because it allows the brain/choice to influence evolution at a higher level.

laughinghan 9y ago

Without passing judgment on the book itself, which I have not read, I find key elements of the argument as presented in this review to be unconvincing. > Consider, for instance, this handful of well-known distinguishing human traits: [...human mating behaviors...] none of these traits evolved in our fellow ape species. Prum argues that they evolved in humans because they help women evaluate men’s prosocial-pleasure potential. Wait but, if they're so helpful, why didn't they evolve in our fellow ape species too? Our mating behaviors aren't any more evolved than apes, the apes of today have had exactly the same amount of time to evolve as we have. Shouldn't this case be made based on archeological species that we've since outcompeted? An a separate note, this review makes it sound like no one else has done significant work on sexual selection. Isn't Fisherian runaway, for example, a well-known instance of sexual selection? And Ronald Fisher was a key figure in the modern synthesis.

pygy_ 9y ago
> Shouldn't this case be made based on archeological species that we've since outcompeted? Wait a few decades and we'll be the only ape species left (not counting captive subjects). Edit, since the above extrapolation isn't apparently convincing: all ape species are currently endangered. While they are not extinct yet, we have outcompeted them to the point where we have to take active measures for them not to become so.
hwillis 9y ago
> Wait but, if they're so helpful, why didn't they evolve in our fellow ape species too? Apes have vastly different social structures than humans. Those structures do not encourage those traits. Apes have strict ranking and group around families. In chimps, females emigrate after puberty and permanently relocate to other groups. Fertility is used as a passport to join a new group. Constant fertility would be disruptive. Humans want to have sex constantly because it helps form large communities. The possibility of mating bonds together many nonfamily groups. Humans do better in large groups, so attractive features are selected for much more strongly. In ape groups it doesn't matter, because they simply accept or reject new apes based on the size of the group and availability of resources.

codeisawesome 9y ago

Haha, what a mischeviously written article. The author appears to have learned a lesson or two :-)